Mind the Location Leakage in LEO Direct-to-Cell Satellite Networks

Leveraging direct-to-cell (DTC) satellites in low-earth orbits (LEO) to directly provide communication services for terrestrial cellphones is gaining popularity in recent years. However, the unique characteristics of the wireless medium in space-ground communication, combined with the dynamic behavior of LEO satellites, raise a new privacy leakage risk that an adversary eavesdropping on DTC broadcasts could steal the physical locations of active users. In this paper, we investigate new techniques to analyze the location leakage risks in emerging LEO direct-to-cell satellite networks (DCSN). We present DCATOR ¹ DCATOR indicates the abbreviation of DCSN terminal locator. , a novel location leakage analyzer which continuously monitors DTC signaling messages in broadcast channels, extracts various location clues and combines them with the time-varying satellite trajectories to infer the physical locations of active users. We use DCATOR to analyze the consequences if an adversary is able to continuously monitor and process broadcast DTC signaling to deduce the locations of other users within the same satellite coverage area, in three representative DCSNs: (i) the operational Iridium; (ii) the developing Starlink DTC; and (iii) a DCSN based on the latest 3GPP NTN standards. Our extensive experiments demonstrate the existence of location leakages in real DCSNs, and in the worst case an adversary can precisely track the locations of other users within hundreds of meters. Finally, we propose privacy-enhancing countermeasures for DCSNs.